Barrett Garese

Distraction coffee

I’m making coffee right now. Not brewing, but roasting the beans. I’m doing so with full knowledge that I’m using it to distract myself from thinking about other things. Roasting coffee takes a certain amount of concentration, so it’s a good distraction. There are sights, smells, and sounds that must be paid attention to. It doesn’t take so much concentration though, that when the inevitable sidetracks that the mind is wont to take during times of stress come about, you’ll quickly burn the beans. Roasting coffee requires just the right about of concentration: enough to distract, but a flexible when it comes to outright incineration.

A friend of mine is in the hospital right now. Well, truth be told she’s a family member more than a friend; if I ever described someone as “the sister I never had” it would be her. I’ve known her and her family long enough to where I don’t remember when we met and my parents consider her as much a daughter as my brother and I are sons. She was admitted last week with imminent liver failure – though the doctors used another, more medical term to describe it. I’m not a doctor, so I don’t know the full extent of it but I know that if there’s a good kind of “imminent liver failure” then she’s got the other kind.

She’s got the kind where my parents send me text messages to update me because she’s been transferred to another hospital in San Francisco with a more experienced staff. She’s got the kind where doctors aren’t really sure what’s going on, but since it’s progressing so quickly they’re damn sure she’s going to need a new liver soon. She’s got the worst kind of imminent liver failure a 28 year old could have: the fast-moving and mysterious kind.

I’m distracting myself from thinking about it. I’m distracting myself from remembering the odds I was told earlier or thinking about the words “survival rate” in any variation or combination. I’m distracting myself because I’ll admit that I’m a little bit lost when things are taken completely out of my control, and being that I’m 450 miles away in Los Angeles, not a specialist or a surgeon, and the most I know about liver is that I’ve eaten it before (not mine, something else’s) the only thing I can do is wait.

Wait for information, wait for word, wait for something to go in one direction or the other. She’s in the ICU and I’m not a family member (“the sister I never had” doesn’t apparently qualify, as my dad used the “as close to a daughter as I’ve got” already to no avail) so flying up there won’t do anything either; I’d just be doing the same waiting in a different – and purpose built - waiting room. Waiting for improvement or…the other thing. Waiting because waiting is all I can do now. Wait, and hope.

So I distract myself, so as not to drive myself insane with all the wondering and wandering my waiting mind can do.

I’m making coffee right now. Distraction coffee.

Waiting coffee.